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5. It is no longer your personal religious view if you’re bothering someone else.

As we have seen in this series, one of the most damaging aspects of prejudice is the assumption that our group is better than others and that we have a duty to reshape others in our own image. When we see ourselves as the norm, we unconsciously judge others in terms of how they are like or unlike ourselves. Because we are unaware of our sense of superiority, we can attempt to impose our personal understandings onto others without being aware that we are impinging on their own freedoms.

Then if others have the audacity to want to live their own lives without our direction, we can feel that it is our own religious liberties that are under attack. We can go to shopping malls and insist that the Christ is being taken out of Christmas even if people from other faiths would like to feel it is their town, too. We can treat any effort by gay people to talk about their own lives as an assault on our families. If I have been taught that we have a right to control others, their efforts to get free of our control may feel like an attack on our imagined right to take away theirs.

You and I both have a right to our own personal religious faith, but for that very reason if we are to live peaceably together, we must each be free from the other. I must be free from your efforts to dominate me, and you must be free from my efforts to dominate you.

A Christian Scientist can choose to refuse medical treatment, but has no right to oppose that same care for others. A Pro-life Catholic has every right to believe abortion is wrong, and even to try to persuade others to their cause, but they have no right to shut down the full range of women’s healthcare simply because they are in the majority in certain pockets of the country.

You have a right to your belief about how others should live their lives. You can even try persuading people to be more like you. But there comes a point where the other person has a right over their own life. They have a right to a home life that is different than yours. They have a right to seek happiness in a way that is different than yours. They have a right not to be harassed by you. It is not a violation of your personal rights, for others to refuse to let you take away theirs.

It’s simple math really. The most profitable business of all time is war. So “free” markets pursuing nothing but profit will seek out war like a lion seeks out wounded zebras.

Convincing the nation to barter its infrastucture to protect the lucrative nature of America’s economic war machine, and making sure that other nations buy American made weapons is a part of the job description of any who aspire to the office of President. At this point, the economy demands it.

The link below will lead you to an article by David Sirota on our “Guns and Butter” economy.

To read article, click here.

Just a note to warn that the blog may be a bit spotty this week. I am leaving in a few hours to go to California to be with Janie Spahr, the brave Presbyterian minister who is scheduled to be rebuked by the Presbyterian Church this week for showing love to the part of God’s family the church doesn’t want to accept. So, for a week, I will be at the mercy of the wifi.

The good thing about this group is you can count on all kinds of activists being there. So I will probably learn all kind of things that are going on around the country on immigrant rights, the environment, education and all kinds of wonderful topics.

I’ll publish when I find wifi spots.

Interesting article sent by Antoninus Pius about a brave church that shows hospitality to its Muslim neighbors in spite of pressure by its community. It is a nice reminder what the church can be when it remembers that Jesus taught love not dogma.

To go to article, click here.

4. You cannot call it “special rights” when someone asks for the same rights you have.

When I was working on the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crime Bill here in Texas, I learned a very important lesson. I learned that the essence of prejudice is not a felt hatred of some other group, but an unfelt sense of privilege over that group. No one I talked to was aware of disliking people of color, or gays, or Muslims; but they did feel any concessions made to protect them from dangers that did not threaten white Christian heterosexuals were “special rights.”
By “sense of privilege” I mean the unconscious belief that whites are in a superior position because we worked harder or were smarter. By “privilege” I mean an unexamined belief that gay people are somehow less moral than heterosexuals by definition. By “privilege” I mean the belief Christianity is the only true religion and that other religions should conform to the world as we see it or move somewhere else.
I learned that because many white people think of themselves as the norm, any discussion of racial issues was talking about someone else. When anyone spoke to them of “civil rights,” they considered it to be someone else’s problem. Any efforts by people of color to have all the same rights white people take for granted were seen by some as wanting “special rights.”
I learned that men consider gender issues to be about women. Again, because many men have been taught to see themselves as the norm, when someone mentioned gender it was someone else’s problem. I often here people in the church talk about a “woman pastor.” What that tells you is that the person considers the woman to be in a male slot. Any effort by women to have all the same rights that men have (like the ERA) are considered as seeking “special rights.”
Finally, I learned that because many heterosexuals consider their own behavior to be the norm, any conversation about sexual orientation seems to be about those other people. There was little conversation about what was fair. The whole topic of sexual orientation seemed to be someone else’s problem. Again, any effort by non-heterosexuals to have the same rights to a home and family that heterosexuals take for granted we seen as the pursuit of “special rights”
It has been said the true test of a lover of justice is whether they offer others every right they claim for themselves. By this noble standard, few could be called lovers of justice. When some religious people presume to have a God given right to take away other people’s rights, I want to beg them to stop thinking about sex for one moment and realize that what these people are seeking is a home, and a family, and a sense of safety. I want to ask them, “Why, for the love of God, are you working so hard to keep them from having the same rights you take for granted?”

3. Truth isn’t like wine that gets better with age. It’s more like manna you must recognize wherever you are and whoever you are with.

Some of the people who disagreed with the article argued that the church shows an unbroken tradition of rejecting homosexuality from the very beginning. It seems to me that the focus on abortion and homosexuality are both relatively recent for the church. To be specific, they emerged after women began to gain power in the world and in the church. It is no coincidence that the religions most opposed to these two practices usually had a problem with women being leaders in the first place.

John Boswell has famously made the case that our modern concept of marriage evolved out of a “friendship blessing” that was based on spiritual commitment, not physical gender. Whatever one thinks of that argument, we have to admit that the argument from tradition has a long sorry record in times of great transition. To insist the earth is flat because it has a long tradition, or that slavery must be right because the ancients embraced it, is habit humanity needs to break. It has been said that the truth repeated becomes a lie. To mindlessly parrot a truth may be further from truth than honest error. The question for me is, is religion a futile effort to go back in time, or is a courageous leap into the future?

What does it mean to call the New Testament “new?” It is two thousand years old after all. Are we merely saying that it is a little less old than what preceded it, or by “new” do we mean it is still alive and breathing? To worship a “living” God means to leave the brackish water of tradition and to strike out on the open waters of life as we live it today. The “new” covenant is a response to the Jewish prophets who called people to sing a new song. Faith in a living God means to let go of our mooring from the past, to uproot ancient prejudices, to pluck up the toadstools of mindless belief, and to open our minds and hearts to a God that calls us from the future. To say one’s religion is ‘new” must mean it is open to the most brutally honest science, the most passionate art, and the commitment to universal human rights for all God’s children.

In the last three months CPPP has released three devestating reports on the impact of budget cuts on the poor.

1. School Budget Cuts Threaten to Increase Summer Childhood Hunger

To read report, click here.

2. Cuts to SNAP (formerly called “food stamps”) Will Hurt Texas Families Struggling to Afford Food
To read report, click here.

3. Finally, nearly 36,000 Texans will lose their federal unemployment insurance today (Saturday, May 12)

to read report, click here.

While our minds create infinite complexity, there is one human heart. When another seems thoughtless or cruel, I need to ask myself what it would take to look at the world that way. The most irreconcilable philosophies can sometimes be bridged if we will but ask what the other hopes and fears.

When there seems no possible meeting of the minds, there is yet hope, we can still meet at the level of our hearts.

In times of ethical uncertainty, when the world seems divided into two camps, the real question that needs to be answered isn’t usually, “who is right?” The real question that needs to be answered is, “what would be an underlying principle that would do justice to both sides?”

2. You are not being persecuted when prevented from persecuting others.

Several respondents found my second point insulting. “We are not persecuting anyone. We love homosexuals, but we just hate their sin.  We have a right to hold our own viewpoints.  When you call us “persecutors” you are judging us like you say we are judging them.”

Looking at the actual words, I don’t believe I accused anyone of anything. I said it isn’t persecution to be prevented from persecuting others.  I didn’t say other people don’t have a right to their own conviction that homosexuality is wrong, I was saying no one has a right to take away the rights of others.

Suppose the shoe were on the other foot.  Suppose I were to act on my belief that fundamentalism is wrong. I believe that literalism and sectarianism result in misunderstanding and violence. Now suppose you are a fundamentalist. Wouldn’t you agree that I have a right to my opinion, but it is something very different if I am arrogant enough to force my belief into law? Now further suppose, as I do, that Jesus condemned fundamentalism in his core teachings. Isn’t it vital that I not presume to force my vision of Jesus even on the church? It is one thing to try to persuade you. I might even consider that my duty. But, it is something very different to coerce you. I am merely saying that I cannot call myself a victim if someone does not let me force my opinions on you.

I believe the unconscious root of all forms of prejudice to be a sense of entitlement and a belief that “difference” means “less than.” In other words, when I unconsciously think of my group as the model for all humankind, I will either attack those who are different, or try to cast them in my own group’s image.  And when we are bigoted against another type of person, we usually have no sense of our own presumption. It just feels like we are looking at the world from a higher vantage point. We are simply reading the text the way God intended it. Those who disagree obviously don’t care about scripture as we do. We, of course, humbly realize that we are sinners too. But because we are sorrier for our sins than others are, it is our duty to serve as referee for the rest of the species. Because our sense of privilege is invisible to us, any effort to describe what we are doing feels like an humiliating insult. So, if anyone steps in to defend our target, we view ourselves as the real victims.

Our prejudice is more easily justified if we can find some verses in the Bible that seem to say the same thing we are saying. There are certainly verses in scripture that seem to condemn homosexuality, but the reason they leap out of their context in the food and cleanliness codes, is because of a prejudiced reading. Prejudice has used the Bible to defend capital punishment for adulterers, banning of divorce, defended slavery, promoted sexism, and called for the corporal punishment of children. The reason those verses convince some and not others has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with the prejudices we all start with before we take up the text.

Let me repeat that I didn’t call anyone a bully or a persecutor. I described bullying behaviors and some people self-identified. What I am calling “fundamentalism” is I believe our survival instinct to simplify the world, to group with people like ourselves and to try to find our way back to a simpler time. I was trying to state a principle that would protect all of us from this frailty we all carry in our human tissue. Let me assure you, I don’t trust myself to be your overlord any more than I trust you to be mine.